In my sermon on Sunday, I said that one obstacle we face in developing the kind of prayer life that Jesus wants us to have is believing that we are doing it wrong—praying incorrectly, praying selfishly. I hope I disabused my congregation of that idea!
Obviously, there are other obstacles that hinder prayer. One is God’s omniscience: the idea that God already knows what we’re going to ask (and what we need), so why bother telling him what he already knows? Once again, Richard Foster handles this objection nicely in his masterful book, Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True Home.
The most straightforward answer is that God likes to be asked.
We like our children to ask us for things that we already know they need because the very asking enhances and deepens the relationship. P.T. Forsyth notes, “Love loves to be told what it knows already…. It wants to be asked for what it longs to give.”[1]
That sounds good, of course. My wife doesn’t need to say she loves me for me to know that she loves me, but I like hearing it. I tell each of my three kids nearly every day that I love them, although usually they have no reason to think that anything has changed in our relationship since the last time I told them.
There is, however, a theological doctrine at stake in this discussion: God’s impassibility. Over the centuries, many Christian theologians have said (including heavyweights like Augustine) that human beings can do nothing to affect God in any emotional sort of way. God is unchanging, therefore nothing we do has the power to change God. To believe otherwise, they say, is to shrink God down to human-size, to make God in our image.
I cling to the idea of impassibility when I feel as if my sin has “let God down.” No, Brent. You don’t have the power to affect God in that way. Who do you think you are? How powerful do you think you are? Besides, disappointment almost kinda sorta implies that God expected more from me, as if God were surprised at how badly I behaved—and how is that possible for a God who already knows, from all eternity, everything that I (and everyone else in the world) will ever do? God’s impassibility seems to affirm God’s omniscience.
But not so fast… We are made in God’s image, which means that God ought to be at least a little like us. More importantly, Jesus, God-in-the-flesh, certainly wasn’t impassible: He allowed the money-changers in the temple to make him angry. He allowed the death of his friend Lazarus to make him weep.
We could sidestep this objection by saying that in his humanness, Jesus didn’t have omniscience, and so these events were able to surprise him—that outside of time and space, God wouldn’t respond this way.
I’m not so sure… After all, the Bible itself has no trouble depicting God as emotional— just like us, except without sin. It even depicts God being surprised. At what point should our loftiest theology conform to scripture? By the way, one thing I admire about John Goldingay’s excellent Old Testament commentary series, For Everyone, from Westminster John Knox, is that he lets the Bible speak for itself without spackling over the rough patches with neat and tidy theology.
For me, the larger issue is the nature of love itself—God’s own nature. Isn’t love about reciprocity, give-and-take? Can’t we imagine that our loving God—even in his omnipotence and omniscience—freely chooses to limit his power and knowledge in order to have a relationship of give and take? Richard Foster thinks so:
Besides, I am not so sure that God knows everything about our petition. It seems that God has freely chosen to allow the dynamic of the relationship to determine what we will eventually ask. The fact that God is all-knowing—omniscient, as we say—does not preclude his withholding judgment on matters in which the decision depends on the give and take of relationship… For now, be encouraged that God desires authentic dialogue, and that as we speak what is on our hearts, we are sharing real information that God is deeply interested in.[2]
1. Richard Foster, Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True Home (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992), 181.
2. Ibid.